Compellent Aces the Storage Test with Kenosha Unified School District
Situated on Lake Michigan's western bank between Chicago and Milwaukee, Kenosha Unified School District seeks to provide an educational system that offers diverse and challenging learning opportunities to more than 22,000 K-12 students. As with many education-focused organizations, Kenosha strives to provide the highest possible education quality within a fixed budget. But Kenosha Unified's IT staff was finding it increasingly difficult to meet district requirements due to a storage area network (SAN) that required specialized training to manage.
With plans to expand storage services to support VMware's ESX infrastructure, a new Student Information System and expanded email service to include the students as well as the staff, Jim Hanrahan, the System Support Specialist started looking for a storage solution that many of his administrators could manage.
"We were looking for a SAN that combined ease of management, a wide range of features and would fit into our budget," said Hanrahan. To effectively meet requirements, Kenosha needed to leverage lower-cost drive technologies, which the current SAN didn't support. Hanrahan knew that managing a multi-tiered storage platform with information lifecycle management (ILM) software would potentially add a new layer of unwanted complexity. Because of this, Kenosha's data needed to be automatically stored on the appropriate tier of storage without any administrator involvement.
For all these reasons, Kenosha selected Compellent's Storage Center SAN - to simplify management, deliver automated tiered storage and allow the organization to affordably expand data services.
Additionally, with Storage Center's wizarddriven interface, administrative tasks like setting up a LUN can easily be performed by any of the administrators, freeing up Hanrahan's time to support the products that use the SAN instead of managing the SAN.
"Storage Center's reporting and capacity planning tool allows me to easily see which volumes are taking up the most space so I can anticipate what type of disk will be needed when," Hanrahan commented. "Best of all, I don't need to add staff to manage the SAN no matter how large the SAN grows."
Snapshots Provide Fast, Flexible Recovery Without Tape
Prior to Compellent, Kenosha School District relied on tape technology to back up its email and database files, which made retrieval an inefficient process. For example, accessing Human Resources and Finance database logs was very slow, frequently taking as long as 5 minutes per log. By utilizing less-expensive SATA drives as Tier 3 storage instead of going to tape, Kenosha Unified School District can now store all of its database logs on the SAN. As a result, access time is nearly instant - only 15 seconds per log. Backup data is now staged on the SAN for faster backup and retrieval and later archived to tape for longterm storage requirements.
Kenosha's Student Information System (SIS), which contains the district's most critical data runs on a SQL 2005 cluster to ensure high availability. "Our SIS stores all our student records, including grades, attendance, emergency contacts and medical information, so we ported it over to the Compellent SAN to provide continuous availability and quick recovery," comments Hanrahan. Kenosha administrators setup regularly scheduled snapshots, called Replays, throughout the day and replicate these Replays to a remote location to provide rapid recovery in case of virus, human error or other data disaster.
Modular Growth Ensures Investment Protection
Storage Center's modular architecture allows Kenosha to expand the capacity and capabilities of its SAN easily. For instance, Kenosha can mix and match SATA and Fibre Channel disk drives and server connectivity technologies such as iSCSI over time without having to replace the existing storage controllers.
"We can simply plug in new drives and connect additional enclosures as needed," comments Hanrahan. In addition, Kenosha is able to continually add functionality without downtime. Starting in the fall, teachers will begin taking attendance electronically on classroom computers. This data will be stored on the Compellent SAN, allowing parents to log in and check student's attendance within a few minutes of the bell ringing. Test scores and grades will be added so parent's can easily monitor their child's progress.
Hanrahan adds, "We plan to continue to add functionality, adopting new technologies like server virtualization and remote replication to offer a higher level of support to our community of users. The beauty of Compellent is that we can keep the same system and grow over time as it makes sense for us."